I want to believe that people like Pierce are genuine and that even depths of bureaucracies like the SEC, there are people who do care about preserving the average person's freedom and who aren't willing to sacrifice everything for some awful, murky "greater good" where everyone is worse off.

So, I feel hopeful when I read things like this:

Just as too many crypto enthusiasts have an unhealthy fixation on “number go up,” too many in the regulatory world (not just people who work in government, but also their many non-governmental data collection cheerleaders) are unduly fixated on “data go up.”

The comparison is apt. A blind belief that data collection must go up or we are doomed isn't so far from the NGU shitcoiners.

Sometimes, however, the human penchant for knowing what others are doing or a fear that regulators will be blamed for not foreseeing a problem drive government data vacuuming. Once government starts collecting a particular piece of data, arguments to stop the collection generally inspire puzzled resistance: If you love America and hate crime and financial crises, how could you want the government to have less information? The steady accumulation of personal information by the government without subsequent checks of initial justifications for collecting it has become our reality. Every additional field of personal and confidential business data the government collects and retains incrementally increases the likelihood the government or a private party will mishandle it by accident or on purpose. (my emphasis)

Pierce nails it here. Clearly, she understands at least a little, the way regulators are risking the safety and freedom of average people in their quest to be more "effective" at their jobs (or just to make their jobs easier).

For decades, the approach to ferreting out illicit finance and uses of the financial system to facilitate other illicit activity has been the same: collect more and more data. The approach is not working particularly well, and technology has outpaced our legacy approach, so it is time for a change. Public ledgers are more transparent and more difficult to alter than any paper record ever was. Cryptography allows us to be confident that a fact is true without knowing the underlying data.

The answer, Pierce says, is zero knowledge proofs. I am skeptical. I love the idea of reducing the amount of information governments collect. It's clear that they cannot keep it safe, that it imposes increased costs, and that it isn't as useful as they claim -- but I don't buy that we will all just ship proofs and that's the end of it. I don't hear Pierce challenging the concept that governments should decide what citizens do with their money or how they speak. She's not arguing against control, she's just trying to make its exercise more privacy preserving. And this is one reason I don't really trust her efforts. She seems little too much like the token freedom-lover who's voice will allow the rest of the government apparatus to proceed merrily ahead with torching freedom.